By Susan Wyndham

When Helen Garner found an email in her junk file last week from someone at Yale University who had "good news" and wanted her phone number, she thought it was a hoax.

After checking with her publisher, she spoke to Michael Kelleher, director of the Windham-Campbell Prizes for writers, who had the excellent news that she had won $US150,000 ($210,820) in recognition of her non-fiction writing.

Helen Garner feels validated as a non-fiction writer by the Windham-Campbell Prize.Credit:Max Mason-Hubers

Admired for her fiction since the 1977 novel Monkey Grip, Garner also writes articles and essays and, in the past 20 years, published three non-fiction books that apply intense personal observation to harrowing court cases – The First Stone (1995), Joe Cinque's Consolation (2004) and This House of Grief (2014), the story of a man who drowned his three sons in a dam.

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"The fact that the prize is for nonfiction is the most gratifying part," she says. "Those books took a lot of skin off me, and over the past year, since This House of Grief came out, I concluded that there was something about the book that was not prize-worthy. It is shaming to care whether you win a prize or not, but something infantile is stirred in you."

She won a Ned Kelly, the Australian crime-writing award, for Joe Cinque and This House of Grief. However, she suspects that "in Australia people who care about genre – and there are lots of them – get the shits with me. I don't fit any categories."

The Windham-Campbell Prizes were established in 2013 with a gift from American writer Donald Windham in memory of his partner, Sandy M. Campbell, and are administered by Yale's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

Each year nine international writers in the fields of fiction, nonfiction and drama (and poetry from next year) are chosen by an anonymous panel of nine judges, some appointed by Windham and others by the president of Yale. Candidates are nominated (usually from their home country) with no submission process – "no humiliation of applying or being shortlisted, or being in competition with other writers", says Garner. A shortlist is prepared by three judges around the world in each category who read the authors' work and supporting critical material.

The judges' citation says, "Helen Garner brings acute observations and narrative skill to bear on the conflicts and tragedies of contemporary Australian life".

This year's other recipients in nonfiction are American: Hilton Als, The New Yorker's theatre critic and author of "free-form essays", and Stanley Crouch, "an iconoclastic and polemical" author in many genres.

Garner is the second Australian winner, following playwright, poet and essayist Noelle Janaczewska in 2014. Past winners also include Jim Crace, Teju Cole, Geoff Dyer, Edmund de Waal, Aminatta Forna, James Salter and Nadeem Aslam.

The only requirement is that the writers attend a literary festival at Yale in September to celebrate their work.

Garner says "there's no way I wouldn't do another book" but has no idea what it might be. At 73, she doubts she could give another wearing seven years to following a trial.

She will publish a collection of short non-fiction, Everywhere I Look, in April. A film adaptation of Joe Cinque's Consolation is almost complete, as is a literary biography of Garner by former academic Bernadette Brennan.